Metze on Capital Punishment and the Violation of Due Process in Texas

Patrick Metze (Texas Tech University School of Law) has posted Death and Texas: The Unevolved Model of Decency (Nebraska Law Review, Vol. 90, No. 1, 2011) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Professor Metze takes a critical look at Texas's substantive capital murder statute, Texas Penal Code § 19.03, the current state of the law, the available constitutional history of each paragraph, the Texas Legislature's expansive growth of death eligible crimes, and the Court of Criminal Appeals' complicity in this development, arguing that the statute has become violative of due process as unconstitutionally vague in its application, returning Texas capital jurisprudence to its genesis, exposing virtually all that commit murder in Texas to a system that once again has become arbitrary, capricious, and discriminatory in its application to minorities and in particular to African Americans.